Ladies in Waiting

by Laura L. Sullivan

  Catherine caught some of it, and her translator supplied the rest.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, one of the few English phrases she was comfortable with, and the one that fit the most occasions.

  Suffolk lingered near. “Please sign your approval, Your Majesty, and I will make all the necessary arrangements. If it please Your Majesty, my humble self has been nominated for mistress of the robes.”

  “Certainly, I quite approve,” Catherine said. She couldn’t pin Suffolk down. She was unfailingly polite and attentive and smoothed the queen’s many flubs of etiquette. At first Catherine was sure she had found a friend. And yet at times she thought Suffolk was like Charles himself, superficially affectionate because she was expected to maintain an act. Still, she was competent and not overtly hostile. Better have her as chief of her ladies than one of the tittering court butterflies who openly despised her.

  Catherine scanned the names, with Penalva looking over her shoulder, her stale breath reeking, though Catherine had given her cloves to chew, saying, diplomatically, that they were good for toothache.

  “Let’s see,” Penalva said. “Mary Villiers. A relation of that wicked Buckingham, I presume, though I know no evil of her personally. Katherine Stanhope, hmm . . . she was Princess Mary’s governess and dear friend, but there was bad business with some jewels after the princess died. I’ll look into the right of it. Jane Granville, a pleasant lady. Oh! Not her! Never her!”

  Catherine’s eyes lit on the hated name the same instant as Penalva’s. She gripped the parchment so hard that it crinkled, and that tiny rustle made the entire room fall still. They had evidently been waiting for the queen’s reaction.

  Her face burning, her hand trembling, Catherine called out, “Fetch me a pen!”

  She dipped at the ink violently and scratched stroke after stroke until the name Barbara Palmer was utterly obliterated.

  Catherine knew almost nothing of the court, but she knew the name Barbara Palmer. All England, all Europe, knew the name of the king’s reigning mistress.

  She handed the document back to Suffolk.

  “I have pricked out one name,” she said, hardly waiting for her attendant to translate. “I think you know who.”

  “But Your Majesty, the king himself has approved this list. Whomsoever he may choose, it is no doubt for the best.” Her voice and movements were languorous, but her eyes sharp for the drama that would unfold. As Barbara was Suffolk’s niece, she had a vested interest in her success. Would Catherine be a queen or a mouse?

  Catherine’s nostrils flared as she struggled for composure. “I would rather have the lowest, meanest, poorest, most despised but honest lady at this court wait upon me than the king’s . . . the king’s . . .” Her lips could not form the word whore.

  “But, Your Majesty!”

  Suddenly resolute (and, Suffolk thought, almost beautiful, for all her yellow skin and ghastly fashion), Catherine stood and said to her audience, “Who is the lowest and poorest among those admitted to the court? Scorned, ridiculed, yet a lady still? I can tell a lady, however low, from a devil, however high. Bring me the worst of your lot, and I warrant she’ll be better than Barbara Palmer!”

  The translator wisely voiced only about half of the speech, but it was enough. Excited murmurs and titters ran through the ladies and foppish gentlemen, and at last they reached a consensus that apparently amused them. They sent a maid off to fetch someone. Catherine, furious, and frightened at her own temerity, sat down and vigorously fanned herself.

  The room grew quiet again, and Catherine wondered how it was that silence could speak so many different things. This was not a reverential hush but the forced, deliberate silence of laughter held in check, a silence that was full of tension, about to erupt at any moment into a cacophony of mockery.

  A girl came through the door. For a terrible moment Catherine was sure it was Barbara Palmer, for the newcomer was dressed in the most scandalously low-cut bodice Catherine had ever seen. The pink of her nipples just peeked over the ruffled suggestion of an undersmock, a thing permissible in one of Lely’s portraits but not in the flesh. Her skirt was gathered up in front to show trim ankles. Only laboring peasants and professed harlots showed their legs.

  She was lovely, too, with an endearing sort of beauty that Catherine, in her limited experience, believed would draw a man better than any other. If I were a man I would love her, the queen thought, but because she was a woman she began to hate her instead, at least until she looked more closely.

  The girl did not match her lewd clothes. She gave an impression of absolute softness, from the light brown curls twining along her temples with no stiffness of glue or sugar water to hold them in place, to the childish plumpness of her dimpled cheeks, her trembling pillow mouth. Her face was garishly painted: carmine lips, cochineal cheeks, hennaed eyelids, and an etching of blue crayon to deepen the natural veins on her chest. Under all that, though, was something small and timid. She was an alluring creature, but she was no whore; Catherine could see that now. She was nervous, almost terrified. One thing was certain—Catherine would have nothing to fear from this beautiful child. But who was she?

  “Come closer, my dear,” she said, beckoning so that it didn’t have to be translated.

  The girl tottered forward, almost tripping on her high-heeled slippers, and the courtiers laughed outright.

  “What is your name?”

  The girl curtsied a mite too deeply, and her breasts escaped that last crucial half inch. Gasping, she clutched her smock and jerked it up, covering her breasts but exposing several mended rents in the worn fabric. Catherine, peering more closely, saw that the girl’s dress, once fine, was worn at the edges, that the metallic braid had lost its luster and the silk was stained with sweat and watermarks.

  “Beth, Your Majesty. Oh! I mean Lady Elizabeth Foljambe.” She bowed her head and looked as if she would weep.

  She wanted to ask Beth more, but Suffolk stepped up and said, “Her mother’s Countess of Enfield. The earl, her father, is dead these last several years. The family were staunch Royalists, but he left them here to Cromwell’s tender mercies and went to the continent. He claimed he gave His Majesty every penny, but the truth is, he and his friend, that notorious rake Ransley, squandered it on gambling and women. Sold the estate out from under them. One of Old Noll’s generals, the new owner, came knocking one day, gave them an hour to pack and leave. For the past two years the old bawd’s been trying to pimp the girl’s noble blood to regain their fortune, but there’ve been no takers. She’s a pretty creature, but beauty’s a hard sell without a dower, particularly when a demon mother comes along.”

  If there hadn’t been a lag of translation Catherine would have stopped Suffolk’s cruel words. But by the time it was rendered into Portuguese, the damage was done and two great tears rose, trembled, and spilled from Beth’s gentle gray eyes.

  Catherine shot Suffolk an angry look, but it could not touch Suffolk’s composure. Her place at court was assured, and it would take the wrath of a greater queen than Catherine to shake it.

  The queen instead favored Beth with her kindest expression. She felt sorry for the child, but more than that, she liked her—instantly, passionately, protectively. On a more calculating level, she knew it would be good to have someone near her, even a lowly maid of honor, less experienced in the ways of the world. Her timidity would make Catherine feel more queenly.

  “Would you like to be one of my maids of honor?” she asked gently.

  Beth looked up fearfully.

  “Best wait till you meet the other half of the bargain,” Suffolk drawled in her sleepy voice. “As every gallant at court knows, you can’t have the girl without the mother.”

  Another hush fell, and Catherine in her newly understood natural history of silence recognized the superstitious fear and awe in this one. A woman limped into the hall . . . at least, it must have been a woman once. Revulsion rose like a live squirming thing in the queen’s belly, and she h
alf stood, ready to run.

  Another would have tried to hide her condition—not so the Countess of Enfield. Every woman wore gloves, so the queen could not see the lesions on the woman’s hands and arms. But she could see the suppurating sores on her throat and chest and could guess what else might be hidden under the blood red of her gown. In that age of infection and pox, sores were commonplace, if generally kept out of the queen’s apartments. It was the lady’s head that looked most unnatural—a mask, a beast. As Suffolk said, a demon.

  The countess’s brow was a lumpy, misshapen thing, a bulbous knob the size of a clenched infant’s fist rising from her temple, throbbing with her pulse. Smaller tumors scattered through the sparse hair of her skull in such profusion as to confound a physiognomist.

  Worse yet, where her nose should have been was a silver hawk’s beak, painstakingly polished to a high sheen, strapped across her cheeks and brow with red cord. The great aquiline false nose was a mockery of the court’s masked balls, one of which Catherine had presided over, though not participated in, since her arrival. There, stunning women gave their faces animal or angelic beauty, covering one form of loveliness with another. Here, grotesque covered horror, all the worse, to Catherine’s susceptible mind, for being unseen. Why would she wear that terrifying raptor’s beak if there was not something far more disgusting underneath?

  “Syphilis,” Suffolk said in her resounding stage whisper. “A gift from her husband. Her nose has crumbled away, alas.” She fanned herself lazily.

  The horror made a formal curtsy, with that perfect balance that comes of strict early training. She’d been bred in the court, lived a life of luxury until her husband squandered her wealth and ruined her body with the disease he picked up on his extramarital carousing. Her rank allowed her free run of the palace, but her appearance and poverty made her a pariah, her daughter a joke. Still, she persevered, flaunting her daughter’s beauty while fiercely guarding her chastity, hoping some man would come along to restore the family fortunes. Her daughter was her widow’s portion, the only bounty her wicked husband left her.

  “Your Majesty,” Enfield said, neither brazen nor timid. “They say you would have my Beth as your maid of honor.”

  “Yes, better her than another,” Catherine said, though now she wanted the girl for her own sake, and to do a kindness to an obviously ill-used old woman. The poor thing, Catherine thought. I will ask Charles to grant her a pension.

  “Well, I suppose she will do as well there as with me. But hear me, Your Majesty, and mark me well. Her chastity is the business of my life, making a good marriage for her my only concern.”

  “I quite understand,” the queen said after the pause of translation.

  “I fear you do not,” the Countess of Enfield said severely, coming closer, head nodding with the characteristic bob of her disease. “My curse is on her, and on any man who touches her. I will give her freely to the right man, but let any try to steal my beauty, my youth, and I will draw and quarter him with my own hands. Him, or her.” She made a motion of twisting and tearing. “And so to you, Your Majesty, if while in your keeping my virgin is debauched.” Her hands rent the queen in invisible effigy, and Catherine shrank back. Was the woman mad? She spoke of the girl’s beauty and youth as if they were her own.

  “You’re a Catholic heathen like the last queen, but at least you’re not like these others.” She jerked her flashing beak at the courtiers, who were torn between mirth and revulsion. “In those idolatrous nations like Portugal you know men for the evil creatures they are, scourge of women, carriers of filth, great hungry maws that drain us of all our virtues and leave us as you see me now. Your husband is such a man. You don’t believe me, I see in your eyes, but those eyes will open soon enough.”

  Catherine wanted to flee, but the woman was so close now, her beak thrusting forward, that Catherine could not stand without almost touching her. Where were the guards?

  “Ha!” the countess went on. “I loved my husband once. Now there’s not a man I wouldn’t crush beneath my heel if I could.” She turned to a nearby fop holding a nosegay to his powdered cheeks. “You.” She ground her foot into the tile, and turned to a big, virile golden-wigged man, the notorious Duke of Buckingham. “You, for certs.” She dug her heel in again and looked to the queen. “And your husband, too, dear. He’s a man, like all the others, and will break you if he can. Make yourself hard, Your Majesty. Deny him everything and you might survive. Be soft and love him, and you will end like me.”

  She broke off in a fit of coughing. “Take her if you will!” she said between hacks. “Take her, but remember, I’ll be watching.” She shuffled off, and the courtiers parted before her, covering their faces with scented handkerchiefs.

  Beth stood through all this with her head bowed, like a dog well accustomed to the whip. Could this gentle, pretty girl truly have sprung from the loins of that monster?

  Catherine stood abruptly. She would show them what it meant to be a queen. Perhaps the Countess of Enfield was right about one thing. She might grant Charles any other request, but she would die before she let his mistress among her most personal attendants.

  “Come, child,” she said to Beth. “You will begin serving me at once. And my lady Suffolk, please amend this list and return it to me for my consideration.”

  Beth trailed behind the bouncing farthingale, believing that the little queen was leading her away from the hell she’d endured since she was first brought to court—on the market as her mad mother’s only commodity, a world of disease and duty, love and disgust, shame and longing—to a paradise of safety and comfort as one of Catherine’s maids of honor.

  Chapter 3

  The Peculiar Specimen

  “WHAT ON EARTH do I do with this?” Zabby Wodewose asked herself as she pulled yard upon yard of rich copper material out of her sea chest. Her father had it sent aboard without letting her see, telling her only to wait until she was ashore in England before wearing it, lest it spoil in the sea air.

  “It’s the latest fashion from France, so they tell me,” her beloved Papa had said to her as she sat with him on the eve of departure, staring into the low hearth, her head resting on his knee. “You will set the Thames on fire, my girl.”

  “I’m not going to England to impress anyone,” Zabby said. “I’m going to learn everything I can—and not about clothes. I can wear any old thing in Godmother Cavendish’s library, and I’ll certainly wear an apron when I mix compounds and grind lenses.”

  He kissed her on the top of her very fair head and said, “Ah, my dear, do it for my sake, if not your own. I’ve kept you like a wild thing here in Barbados, and it would please me to see you in some finery.”

  “You’ve had too much Rhenish wine, Papa!” she’d said with a laugh. “Your reasoning is faulty—you won’t be seeing me when I’m there.”

  “All the same, my dear, wear it, and have a few more made up once you’ve settled. There is nothing in this world so pure as the unruffled, chill beauty of youth. Like rarefied metal, a serene, airless vacuum. Like a theorem proven.”

  She laughed and tried to argue, but he only kissed her again and went to his bed. She sailed with the morning tide.

  Now, two months later, they struck sounding off Dover, ahead of a storm, and as they eased into port she prepared to wear his gift. She lay the skirt on her bed and unconsciously bent her knees as the ship shifted in the chop of the docks. She was an experienced seawoman, and so long as it was not actually raining she could be found strolling along the deck, heedless of the heaving, reading a book as she walked. This was her fourth long ocean voyage—once from England to Barbados as a child, then to Virginia and back with her father, and now to her natal soil to complete her education with her godmother, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, philosopher and authoress.

  She arranged the undergarments and finally pulled out something she knew about but had never worn—a pair of bodies, or a bodice.

  She might be an arist
ocrat, but she was a plantation aristocrat, who was always looking to the laborers, experimenting with the crops, testing improvements to her fleet of tiny sailboats, and above all, concocting compounds and testing ideas in Papa’s elaboratory. She wore breeches most of the time, and since their land stretched hundreds of acres, there was no one except the slaves and indentured servants to stare. If she did wear a dress, for coolness or the occasional social call, it was a loose one-piece tied at the waist and throat with a ribbon, or an unboned jacket and skirt, hemmed above the ankles. She had never laced herself into whalebone, never been in close company of a lady who did. Her father’s friends were all men, and she had neither a comrade close to her own age with whom to speculate nor an older woman to guide her. When she looked at the stiff bodice with its spider web laces, she was at a loss.

  She puzzled over the luminous copper thing but could see only one way of wearing it, laced in the front. How else was she to fasten it? One of the plumper cooks on the plantation stuffed herself into a front-knotting stomacher; it must be something like that. “Gemini, that’s wretched,” she said as she wiggled herself into the garment. A stiff board embedded in the material flattened her back from the shoulder blades down, and the neck was so high in the front that it almost choked her. Her bare back felt indecent. “Papa says this is what they’re wearing in France,” she mumbled as she secured the laces across her chest.

  Even loosely tied, the thing made it hard to breathe, and the board at her back prohibited her from bending. Why are women such fools about fashion? she wondered. Imagine, a board at your back! “I’ll make him happy in absentia this once, though I warrant Godmother Cavendish has more sense than to imprison herself in a cage of silk.”